Partly Luck

The Wurts Brothers, in 1951, showing “General View – Manhattan – Aerial view – West 34th Street- Seventh Avenue – looking southeast” as seen from the Nelson Tower:

It’s always notable when most or all of a block of prime Manhattan real estate is not built out near what is allowed; it’s more notable when that group of low-rise buildings is surrounded on all sides by big buildings. Of course, 1951 is over 70 years ago, so surely it’s been built on since…

There are, I’d guess, two forces at play here. The first is that the storefronts, on this block adjacent to the Herald Square shopping nexus and across the street from Macy’s, are quite valuable in terms of retail potential. The driving force in the development and redevelopment of Manhattan lots is money, and if you owned one of these little buildings, you’re making money.

That leads to the other issue: most likely, the ownership of this series of lots along 34th Street is fragmented. Traditionally, the first step of building a big building in New York has been assembling the site by buying individual lots to combine. If you can skip that step, in whole or in part, by building a site where a bunch of lots have already been combined, so much the better. For example, the Empire State building site encompassed the lots originally combined for the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Combining lots can be difficult if the owners have a reason to not sell…such as making money from retail space.

I have to believe that in the long run this block will be replaced by a bigger building, probably with a bunch of retail spaces at the base. But for now, we’ve got a group of survivors.